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It’s just under two months until my book about twitchhiking is published, and the past week has been spent wading through copy edits and amends, and upsetting my editor by deciding to hack out whole chunks of chapters after the manuscript had been proofread. There’s a phrase about a horse and its cart that applies in such situations.

Anyway, yesterday I spied this in the grasp of a journalist – it’s a trade sampler of the book, which features the first draft of the first seven chapters. It’s produced to encourage wholesalers to stock the book and to pique the interest of the press.

I hadn’t seen a copy of it before, and became a little too excitable. Actually, I was looking for an opportunity to steal it, but short of a mugging it wasn’t going to happen.

Before yesterday, I only knew my book as a lengthy Word document, so it was surreal to see a sample of it typeset, my name splashed across the covers. Admittedly it’s the name of several thousand other people too, but I put those words inbetween those covers; where else will you read a book that travels three continents and takes in social media, human kindness, Indiana Jones, Glen Campbell, moon rock, Afterburner, Fox Mulder, hobbits, Porky Pig, Nutella, Rhys Ifans, dolphins, Superman II and Liv Tyler?